D8| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
DESIGN & DECORATING
Our peregrinations continued:
You can actually sleep in the Poli
House Hotel, though Egyptian-Ca-
nadian designer Karim Rashid’s
new bright, look-at-me furnishings
conflict with the Bauhaus spirit.
The horseshoe-shaped Jacobson’s
Building, with its ribbons of balco-
nies, looks like a gorgeously ma-
rooned cruise ship.
Once back home, I eyed a re-cre-
ation of Mies’s cantilever chair, S
533 F, one of many rereleases that
celebrate the 100th anniversary of
the Bauhaus. Commissioned by the
German firm Thonet, its gravity-
defying tubular steel would add
some much-needed curves to the
right angles of my Lincoln Park
apartment. And the geometric fab-
rics by Bauhaus member Gunta
Stölzl and her student, Anni Al-
bers, recently released by New
York textiles company Designtex,
would complement my circa-1955
glass-and-steel coffee table. My
husband usually resists color in
our austere apartment (we don’t
even have plants), but soon he will
come home to see our ash gray
sofa newly re-upholostered with
Stölzl’s sunny, graphic fabric. And
he’ll have only Gropius to blame.PILGRIMAGE
F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS
No Shame in Your Game
Classic diversions get a posh makeover
FAST FIVE
Clockwise from top left: Four in a Row in Hand-poured Acrylic,$1,495, edie-parker.com; Sunnylife Lucite
Jumbling Tower,$130, okthestore.com; Luxe Dominoes Mexican Train Game,$200, comingsoonnewyork.com,
Bridge Set by Margaret Preston,about $23, thirddrawerdown.com; Snakes & Ladders Board in Calf Leather,
from $782, williamandson.com.Market editor: Kelly Michèlle Guerottoinspiration is from,” she said. And
because its inlaid-bone top and
hammered-brass base read as a
neutral, “it can work with different
palettes even though it’s not a plain
white or a solid of some kind.” The
table could pair with blush pinks
and soft upholstery, or in a more
testosterone-rich space, with greys
and leathers. The top’s pattern,
meanwhile, makes the surface for-
giving of spills. And roughly $1,200
for a piece intricately crafted of
brass and bone, said Ms. Bara-
daran, is a steal.—Rachel WolfeLess Is Moroccan
A designer’s pick of Anthropologie’s Spring lineup
Los Angelesinte-
rior designer
Natasha Baradaran
(left) has found
that clients are of-
ten wary of square-edged coffee
tables, which can be unkind to
adult knees and children’s noggins.
So when she spotted this oval, rela-
tively minimalist take on Moroccan
décor in Anthropologie’s Spring
2020 catalog, she noted its beauty
and benevolent silhouette. “You
don’t feel you would buy it in Mar-
rakesh, but you can tell where theASSAF PINCHUK (POLI HOUSE); F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BAUHAUS MODEL, FABRIC)SHIP SHAPEThe curves
of Poli House Hotel in
Tel Aviv resemble a prow.hastily filled with putty that would
make Walter Gropius shudder.
I perked up once I was in the
square that’s become the city’s so-
cial heart. Yaacov Agam’s
circa-1986 kinetic fountain played
elegantly against the Bauhaus
buildings that ring the square.
They include a pristinely restored
1938 movie house, now the Cinema
Hotel and the restrained apartmentcomplex 94-96 Dizengoff, both de-
signed by Ukranian-born Yehuda
Megidovitz. At the nearby Bauhaus
Center, its founder, Micha Gross,
told us that with the centennial of
the school, he’s seen interest in the
White City increase astronomically,
at least among visitors. “Tel Avivi-
ans start to recognize the beauty
of the Bauhaus buildings only once
they are renovated,” the Swiss im-
migrant said. “Fortunately, at this
moment, all over the town, build-
ings are getting fixed and the gen-
eral consciousness is improving.”I
TWASa curious confluence
of events that transformed
me into a fangirl of the Bau-
haus, the German design
school that architect Walter
Gropius founded in 1919.
The first was a 2001 trip to Wal-
den Pond with my now husband. At
his beseeching, it included a tour of
the Gropius House in Lincoln,
Mass., which required visitors to
wear surgical booties. Shortly
thereafter, I had delivered to my
Manhattan office six slavishly ren-
dered miniature ceramics of build-
ings designed by members of the
Bauhaus. I displayed them lovingly
on my desk. Then, in 2003, Unesco
designated about half of Tel Aviv’s
so-called White City—a planned
section where some 4,000 Bauhaus
buildings stand—a World Heritage
site. It was as if the gods of archi-
tecture were coaxing me to Israel.
But life got in the way. By the
time I stood in Tel Aviv, a high-tech,
vibrant city of 435,000, it was De-
cember, 2019, the very end of the
100th anniversary of the Bauhaus’s
founding and it all had come to
mean even more to me. In the inter-
vening years, I’d moved with my
family into a Chicago apartment
building designed in 1961 by Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, the last director
of the Bauhaus school.
That first morning, sunglasses in
hand, I fully expected to be blinded
by the light reflected off the white
minimalist buildings that make up
much of Tel Aviv. Experts estimate
120,000 to 150,000 Jews fleeing Eu-
rope settled in this desert city
along the Mediterranean between
1931 and 1948, when the state of Is-
rael was established. According to
Nitza Szmuk, architect, restoration
expert, and professor emeritus at
the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology, “They needed quick
and cheap construction for the new
immigrants, and the pure architec-
ture and lines of the Bauhaus fit the
place and the idea of a new, mod-
ern life in a new, modern country.”
About a half dozen architects who
had studied with Gropius cooked up
thousands of concrete buildings thatwere functional and free of adorn-
ment. The balconies, small in Ger-
man iterations, were expanded here
to take advantage of breezes, while
windows were minimized to combat
heat. Despite introducing the occa-
sional curve, architects strove for
linear uniformity and egalitarianism.
The structures were painted a prac-
tical, inexpensive white.
Walking from our little hotel off
Dizengoff Square, I didn’t need
those sunglasses. Telephone wires
blocked dingy balconies; concrete
corners crumbled; cracks had beenBYHEIDIMITCHELLIt was as if the gods of architecture were coaxing
me to Israel. But life got in the way.
Mini
Bauhaus
Plaster
Models,
from$175,
chiseland
mouse.com
Walter
Gropius
TAC 02
Teapot,
$95,
dwr.com
Bauhaus-
inspired
Shirt
Dress,$115,
cosstores
.comS 533 F Anniversary
Chair,about $2,144,
thonet.de
Designtex +
Gunta Stölzl
and + Anni
Albers textiles,
from $68
a yard,
designtex.comYOUR OWN ’HAUS/BRING HOME A BIT OF THE 1930S LOOK
TarguaMoroccanOvalCoffeeTable,$1,198, anthropologie.comCATALOG CURATION
From My House to Bauhaus
A tenant of a Chicago glass tower visits Tel Aviv, a city packed with examples of the minimalist German style